“By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.”
— Cormac McCarthy
Saturday morning I woke up early to get ready for the King. Big coronation ceremonies don’t happen every weekend so Arle and I figured we’d better tune in. I’m no royalist either; to me: they don’t make sense. But I’m guessing that, to them: I don’t make much sense either. And so it goes.
Down in the kitchen the dogs seemed a bit alarmed to see me. Early is fine with me, but lately I have run out of steam. The early mornings and the long drives to the older kids’ school has shattered my soul. I’m over it. Getting out of bed on the gerbil wheel makes me think about eating a bullet. Maybe that’s why I’m up now/ a touch groggy from my two glasses of wine last night/ so that I can fill the classic rumpledadskin hole in me with the ultimate in vicariousness.
Get up early on your day off, peasant.
Stand and watch the king in his hour.
At the coffee pot there are the usual curses at the dogs. Their relentless whining and shifting and clacking all over the floor makes me mental in the wee small hours. I know they are excited to be at the cliffs of breakfast, but something about their simplistic energized one-track mindedness turns me off. Sometimes I fake them their food but there’s only one nugget of kibble in the bowl. Then I let them process that for a while. It’s cruel, having power. Being the man in charge can push you towards a vigorous reprehensibility. And I understand the game as well as anyone. Give the man without power a fat line or two of the real thing and he will come up from the mirror sniffing and snarling at the universe through a hell-baked smile. Blow that rich boy second-hand bedazzled smoke into a poor fool’s eyes (like me) and horrible, horrible things can happen.
Gangsters get born.
Thugs step right out of tiny frail boys.
Men become men with blood on their daggers, in the dark of the shadows.
Or not, I don’t know much about it either way. I just know I was up at the ass crack of dawn, as they say in the Royal Family.
And that I was maybe still a little drunk from before.
_____
Prince Charles: Good morning, Mummy, I see you are up at the ass-crack of dawn.
Princess Camilla: Why yes, yes, dear Charles, Mumzy mustn’t slumber when ‘tis such a momentous day ahead for her lovey dovey squishy bubbly!
Price Charles: Heavens, it IS a rather important morning then, now, isn’t it?!
Princess Camilla: I wish times were the old ones this morning. Such that I could stand before the Royal Court and insist upon the heads of mine enemies rolling by dusk this evening!
Prince Charles: Oh, Mumzy, bad, bad Queenie! Oh, how I do absolutely delight in your deliciously sinister foundations!
Princess Camilla: Hush now, Bubbly! We must prepare to be crowned! TODAY IS THE DAY OF ALL DAYS I DO SAY!!!
(They exit stage left, as the spotlight fades like the evening sun).
Back in the bedroom, Arle is awake and the TV is on with the talking heads speaking in heavy British accents about things I don’t even try to register yet. I catch drips and drabs/ the cost of all this hoopla and the public’s opinion of it all. I set Arle’s travel mug of coffee down by her bedside. Black, two ice cubes. And a different travel mug with ice water. There’s no food here at this party. I had dreamed of real English things: eggs and soldiers/ rashers and blood pudding/ mushrooms steaming like horse shit on a frosted country heath.
Tea in real cups.
Marmite from a glass pot.
But there’s nothing. I have dropped the football (soccer ball to you, you uncultured swine) and I have failed to get my ass to Wegman’s to drop $150 on ‘cultural delicacies’ from Great Britain. Fuck all that anyway. I would have made it happen if I knew I could get some straight-up Jack The Ripper Jellied eels in a paper cup because that would have made this morning working-class special. But they don’t have that kind of thing around here. And they never will.
So we sip our crappy coffee, me and Arle, and we listen to the background sound more than the voices on the television. Behind their incessant chatter hides the story. Lurking back in the driving rain of a dank May morning, London is breathing and you can make it if you want to. The clomping of horse’s hooves/ the distant tolling of an airhorn. The city of cities/ and here for us now/ as she exhales some sort of humming buzz, barely audible/ hardly perceptible/ and quite possibly fully imagined by me, yours truly, as I stare at the screen and drift off like I do. Into a past I can no longer say was certain, but a past I carry around with me nonetheless. Perhaps it is truth, perhaps it is imagined. Most likely, of course, is that some of it is one and some of it is the other. None of it is guaranteed. All of it is mine to do what I like with.
Which is why I find myself feeling somewhat giddy here in my caffeine spin this morning. I begin to speak to Arle. A lot. About this that and the other thing. She has yet to step foot on British soil but her day will come. Most of her ancestors are from there.
The more coffee I drink, the more clearly I begin to envision things.
Her dark Scottish clouds draw me in. Her inimitable blues and her spurts of laughter that win me the day if it is my words she is chuckling at. Her blood red hair slapping her pale face in the afternoon wind. Her freckled fingers on a glass of ale, the odor of lamb, the crackling of the fire. I stare at Arle in our bed out of the corner of my traveled eye but I cannot recognize the feeling that I feel. She has the chest of her hoodie pulled up over her lips as if to silence herself. Or to cover her/ hide her away from the blowing gusts of all this early action kicking off our day when we ought to be sleeping probably.
I get horny.
Even now, even all this time later, my body slipping down off of my bones and melting into a slathered heap of lame physical genetics, I still detect the tinge of the pull of the horses she rides. Out of nowhere, into nothingness, a crimson flash of absolute woman. I want her so bad then and I suspect I could have her. Peasants in the bushes, in the shadow of the castle, an hour before the start of ceremonies, fucking like badgers. Like river rats or mad, mad hares.
I prepare to make my move, watching her watching the procession begin to roll out, the gilded overwrought carriage carrying Charles and Camilla/ we can hear it now/ the undertaking of the plan/ the people churning/ roiling/ crying out/ from crowds so thick/ under the budding trees along the longest road/ we both hear it all beginning to begin.
I want to jump her country bones in this American predawn bedroom.
I want to grab the Pennsylvania Scot by the hand and bend her lips back with my lips and mash teeth so that we can hear them clinking like champagne toasts in the pub.
So much to master, this trying to be good. So much to tamp down when all I want is to grab her and heave my breath in her left ear. Heavy sighs that rush her heart. Backwoods rumblings that only she can hear, but maybe the whole world too. Or maybe the sounds of us go piped straight into that carriage so far away, you know?
The soon-to-be King and his soon-to-be Queen waving out at all of the commoners as they speak in polite terms.
There, you see them, Charles, the children with the filthy fingers?!
Oh dear, yes, Mumzy, I do indeed! Boogie Finger Mustn’t Linger!
What is that dreadful sound, My King? Oh bloody hell, it is making me quake it’s so nasty!
Yes, yes, what IS that horrid audio?! I hear it but it seems to be coming through these speakers here in the carriage! What could it possibly be?!
Pfff.
YOU know what it is, old reader friend.
YOU know.
Haha. So grimey but so satisfying, ain’t it? The sound of two faraways getting it on in the morning of a distant land. The longing sighs hurling through space chased by deep groans of ecstasy. Forbidden fruit growing with the quickness straight up from between their royal legs!
What is happening to me, my sugared magpie!?
Why do I hear a man’s voice saying, “Arle”!?!?
But I don’t do it. I refrain. I restrain. Mostly because I don’t want to cause Arle to miss this whole parade. That is, after all, the reason we are even awake at this godforsaken hour on our only morning off without kids.
I watch her sip her coffee and pull the hoodie back up over her lip. She seems so young and mature at the same time. Her strange, rare beauty. Her goddamn elegant Scottish blood poise wrestling with my hyper randy French bits, it all just makes me feel aggro inside. But like, gentle aggro. Like gentlemanly violent.
Her forever legs under the covers, Jesus Christ, I feel one of them touch the side of my foot.
I clamp my jaw shut and try to laugh at all of these random worlds I’m always living in at once. Simultaneously boiling in my own juices as I calmly try to steer fifty life-affirming ships at once.
It’s exhausting.
And it’s sublime.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin. Once in a blue Muskie Moon, he backs away from the computer, straps on a guitar and plays some rock ’n’ roll with his brother Dave and their bandmates in Marah.
